Last week we notified the five winners of our inaugural VNI Service Awards competition. When we launched this program on March 26, 2013 our goal was to inspire others about the human aspect of what it means to be connected. We wanted to learn how various communication technologies were being used. How does having access to the Internet and mobile services impact the daily lives of people and their community? This is how we want to measure the value of being connected, and having access to reliable communication channels.

The final scores were based on a combination of the judge’s scores, and a ranking assigned to the number of comments per story. It was difficult selecting the top five stories as there were many tied scores. We had to go to two decimal points to get the final list. The point spread between the five winners was only 0.75 out of a max of 5.00 points. Read More »

To help us understand what business executives think about ‘the cloud’ and the impact of cloud collaboration to their businesses, we asked Forbes Insights to conduct research. In response, Forbes surveyed over 500 senior executives from global companies with sales ranging from $250 million to over $20 billion, and interviewed 15 executives. The study examined the ways business executives increasingly look at cloud collaboration as a way to increase productivity, accelerate business results, and enhance innovation and collaboration across borders and functions. We weren’t surprised by the positive response to cloud, but some new and very interesting findings opened our eyes.

This is my second blog in a multi-part series. In my first blog, I introduced insights from Cisco’s Collaboration Work Practice Study and how people value collaboration in the work environment. In today’s blog, I discuss how building relationships helps foster collaboration.

At its very core, collaboration is about people. This isn’t a new concept. Humankind has been coming together for centuries to collaboratively solve problems, and in that respect, today is no different. What has changed are the ways in which people collaborate.

One of the things we discovered through the Cisco Collaborative Work Practice Study is that people desire relationships and strong partnerships with the people with whom they work. Building relationships and networks that lead to trust is a fundamental element of successful collaboration. Nearly every participant in the study Read More »

This is the first blog in a multi-part series. In upcoming posts, I delve deeper into the study and how technology is changing the way we work together.

Collaboration. It’s defined as “the act of people working together to reach a common goal.” Simple, right? But today’s technology era brings new dimensions to how we work together. We collaborate across time zones, across cultures, across personalities and behaviors, and all across a multitude of mobile devices, from smartphones and laptops to tablets and more.

And the scope and reach of technology will only get bigger and become more complex. As technology essentially makes the world smaller, the value and impact of collaboration increases — from the amount of projects you can undertake, to the productivity of employees, to the speed of implementation.

Collaboration has always been a core component of our culture at Cisco. And just as we use and optimize our technology to solve challenges and bring business benefits to our customers, we study our own organization to better understand the human behavior of collaboration and how it affects employee productivity, workplace efficiency, and business results.

We recently completed the Cisco Collaboration Work Practice Study, a qualitative, ethnographic, global research study that provided us with insight to how we collaborate at Cisco. Our findings Read More »

Following on from my recent blog about “Is Manufacturing Coming Back to the US?” one of Morgan Stanley’s Investment guys, Ruchir Sharma, (Managing Director and the head of the Emerging Markets Equity team) has a book out called ‘Breakout Nations’ and in it he says:

“Every Investment idea is right for a while”

He was talking to Fareed Zakaria on his GPS program. Fareed cited that in the 1980’s investing in Japan made you a big winner until the 90’s came around. In the 1990’s it was all about Tech stocks. Then the Tech bubble burst. The Fad for the 2000’s was emerging markets.

And he asked are emerging markets submerging? I was interested mainly because the discussion lead to which countries invest most in R&D, and that is a leading indicator of success for economies worldwide. In fact, the numbers don’t lie. It looks like we may be entering a new phase with different leaders of growth, and it may be the US that becomes the new focus of manufacturing and innovation.

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